Sovereign cloud problems

The Netherlands’ Tax and Customs Administration has abandoned its planned Microsoft 365 public-cloud rollout.

Europeans are, of course, interested in reducing their dependency on American tech. And, sure, why not?

You can imagine the opposite: if America was dependent on France for email, Germany for CRM, and The Netherlands for IaaS, we’d probably be upset about the dependency – more than likely our usual nativist tendencies would kick in.

Sovereign cloud, in this case, means “not American tech.”

Avoiding US tech sometimes means moving to open source, which carries the assumption of lower costs. There’s an opportunity for the EU to do some major funding of open source software by directly hiring and paying open source maintainers. Paying the stability and security of EU society – affordable, if “free” health insurance for the whole family – would be a nice part of compensation.

Meanwhile, Netherlands police recently seized a server running in Amsterdam, it seems, at the request of American authorities:

In a written response to the ANP news agency, Amsterdam’s Public Prosecutor’s Office stated that the seizure was carried out under the mutual legal assistance treaty between the Netherlands and the U.S. In this case, the prosecutor’s office said there was no ground for refusal. It also noted that the seized data have not yet been shared with the U.S.

As one person said: “You can’t solve legal problems with technical solutions.”